MOT’S PICTURE
Mot looked like a cartoon mouse.
He was small, even for first grade with a wintry, Irish complexion, big ears and tufts of spiky hair sprouting out of a cowlick on the back of his head. His cloths were too big for him except for the small blue cardigan sweater with brass buttons which he wore every day. He looked like a character sketch Walt Disney had thought better of and thrown out.
Ezekiel sat next to him in Mrs. Arendarski’s first grade class at Woodrow Wilson Elementary school.
His name wasn’t really Mot, it was Tom, but he always wrote his name from right to left so it came out Mot. Dickie Stewart had been the first to hold it against him but now everyone called him Mot and he had come to accept it.
Most of the class was quiet and solitary, but there seemed to be something particularly isolated about Mot. His eyes were always very wide and he listened to things with his mouth open. He wore a constant, almost worried expression that seemed to ask “Am I in your way? Ezekiel didn’t know it at the time but he saw something of himself in Mot’s small, pallid face and he could not help noticing him.
One day the class was given an assignment. They were to draw a picture of their own houses with some kind of weather occurring around it. Mrs. Arendarski told them “It can be anything you want.”
Mrs. Arendarski was the sort of teacher you don’t see much any more. An immigrant from Great Britain, she was the classic English grade school disciplinarian. Strict and aloof, she was distant from every child except those few of whom she approved. When Mot looked at her, he seemed troubled, as though she worried him in the same way the sight of a big dog roaming loose on the playground might. To Ezekiel, it looked almost as if Mot were trying to see inside her. Intuitively, he seemed to understand what those wide eyes were looking for.
The Manila paper was passed out and those of the class who did not have their own crayons were given the industrial eight-color set. Ezekiel had the sixty-four color box with the sharpener on the back and always took great pains to pick the proper color.
Crayolas in hand, Ezekiel began to draw his house. He drew windows, bushes, his cat, Junior on the front porch. The picture was a challenge of memory and dexterity. He drew each brick, painstakingly, each blade of grass, each leaf on the trees in the front yard, and then, tiny droplets of rain in neat rows falling at an angle. He looked up to see Mot wearing the end off an industrial black crayon, working feverishly, tongue jutting out from the corner of his mouth. Ezekiel looked back at his own picture. Suddenly it did not look as good as it had a moment ago. He scanned the whole thing carefully. The detail was there, all meticulously rendered, but it had no feeling. It did not look like his house.
Ezekiel was considering asking for another piece of paper when Mrs. Arendarski stopped writing at her desk, stood up and said "All right class. You may hand in your pictures now." She went down each row collecting drawings. When she came to Ezekiel, he had the sudden impulse to tell her that he didn’t think his drawing was very good and that she shouldn’t pay much attention to it, but before he could say anything she had moved on. When all of the pictures were collected, Mrs. Arendarski flopped them down on the big wooden table in front of the chalkboard. The gesture seemed very careless to Ezekiel, as if she had done it hundreds of times and did not particularly enjoy it. It made him feel a twinge of shame, as though the whole class was responsible somehow. She sat at the edge of the table and began going through the pile, holding each one up for the class to see while making commentary. Most of the drawings were like Ezekiel’s, valiant efforts to capture detail but with little concept of feeling or personality. When she came to his, she looked at it for a long while before holding it up. Ezekiel had a moment of genuine fright before she finally said; “Now I really like what Ezekiel has done here, class. Do you see how he has remembered that rain always falls at an angle? Very good Ezekiel.” She smiled at him, a grand, approving smile that made him look away, an uncontrollable grin stretching across his face making him feel self conscious and ugly.
She went through a few more until she came to Mot’s picture. She looked at it with a sour expression and then, shaking her head in obvious disapproval, held it up for the class to see. Ezekiel’s mouth dropped open.
It was remarkable.
A tiny blue house stood in a green field. The house was a shadow, unimportant in the huge expanse of grass, dappled with red and orange. Above the field was a sky so deeply black that you could not tell it had been rendered with a crayon. It looked more like black velvet or new blacktop. In the sky, swept in a great arc that went from one side of the paper to the other, were objects, Chunks of some unknown, space-going substance, huge green and yellow meteors or roiling balls of energy. What ever they were supposed to be, they had such a lurid presence that they seemed to be almost flying off of the paper. Their shape and color were so striking against the incredible blackness Mot had created that they seemed to bind everything else together. There was a symmetry to it that felt strong and positive. The eyes did not drift to any one particular thing; you could see the whole picture, all at once! Ezekiel was dumbfounded. He sat blinking his eyes and feeling excited without knowing why. He knew what it meant. There was no explanation, no reasons that he could put into words… he had never seen anything remotely like it, yet somehow he just knew what it was. The whole thing looked so familiar that he felt he could have done it himself, if only it had occurred to him. It was as though Mot had drawn a picture of something that everybody knows about deep down inside.
Ezekiel was actually considering asking Mot if he could have the picture when he noticed Mrs. Arendarski. Her face was a blank. She sat in silence for a full minute while the air in the room went thick. Finally she primly raised her chin as if to make herself that much bigger and dropped a look of almost hateful disgust down toward Mot. It was like the sun shining through a magnifying glass. The light fell on his pale little face and began to burn him.
“What is this supposed to be?” she said flatly.
Ezekiel looked at Mot, for that matter, so did everyone else in the room.
He sat there, mouth still opened, his brow twitching above confused eyes and said nothing.
“What are these THINGS supposed to be!” Barked Mrs. Arendarski, jabbing angrily at the objects.
Mot said nothing.
“This makes no sense! You were supposed to draw us a picture of your house in the weather!”
Mot said nothing.
“Are you going to answer my question?”
Mot could not answer because his face was falling in on itself. His head dropped down to his desk, encircled by his blue sweater clad arms. His mousy ears began to turn scarlet like burning coals. Ezekiel could almost feel the heat from them.
Mrs. Arendarski glared at him and continued relentlessly,
“Thomas!” She barked.
Slowly Mot’s head rose from his desk. He looked as though he’d been pushed down a flight of stairs.
“When I ask a question, I expect to be answered!”
Mot said nothing
“Well?!”
All he could do was look at her pleadingly.
Ezekiel would remember that look for the rest of his life. Over the years he would, by chance, witness agony in many forms. Shame, betrayal, failure, grave illness, even gruesome, untimely death, but the look of pure ruin on Mots tiny face at that moment would remain the single most intense look of pain he would ever see.
Mrs. Arendarski huffed a disgusted sigh, “You’ve written your name wrong again too, Mot!” She slammed his picture down and went on.
Ezekiel watched Mot for a long time.
Slowly the color drained from his face leaving him even more pallid than usual. His mouthed closed, lips pursing tightly to in a thin line. His shoulders and chest drew inward and his wide open eyes glazed over and dropped into a dead stare.
For the rest of the day Ezekiel felt very odd. The things that usually distracted him and lifted his spirits, like watching Star Trek at 4:30 or having chop souy for dinner, seemed strange. It felt as though all of his favorite toys didn’t belong to him anymore.
Ezekiel never showed his own picture to his parents like he usually did. He tore off the gold foil star that Mrs. Arendarski had stuck next to his name and watched it spin like a maple seed down to the ground and dropped the picture into a mud puddle on the way home from school.
The next day, Ezekiel thought about saying something to Mot, but he never did. Maybe it was because he knew somehow that it wouldn’t have made any difference... that nothing would make any difference. For the rest of the year, Ezekiel would watch Mot whenever the class was assigned a picture to draw. Mot would stare at the paper; lips pursed tightly, make a few marks and then stare off into space with vacant eyes, seeing nothing.
Ezekiel had been too young to understand why what had happened should bother him the way it had. It wasn’t until years later, when he had lived long enough to know the true severity of Michigan’s baneful weather.
The answer came unwelcome, like a frost in late spring.
Rain doesn’t always fall at an angle.
Ezekiel had seen it drop straight down from the sky…
Like a ton of bricks.
